New Digs

Friday, I took a brief tour of the Haslett Armory in Dover. The old National Guard Armory has been gutted and reconfigured as a new state office building. The project has been under way for several years. My group is one of the offices that will move there in February.


This is one of the outside hallways on the third floor, where I will have an office. The old armory was dominated inside by a huge gymnasium area. It was used for indoor military training and vehicle storage and was two stories or more inside with large windows along each wall.

In reconfiguring the building, the state wisely left those windows intact and built two floors of offices within that huge space, leaving an open airway up each outside wall.

The Armory is on Legislative Mall in the center of Dover. We'll be surrounded by other state offices and kitty-corner to Legislative Hall. This is a big improvement. Our present office is several blocks away, across the St. Jones River and isolated from the rest of the government. Meetings out of the office always required a car. Now we'll be in walking distance of many of our colleagues.

Or, they can come to us. The Armory will have several conference rooms, large and small. It looks like I will be able to hold most of the meetings I host in the rooms that will now be available.

This is an interesting situation. This year is my 16th as a state of Delaware employee. I'm with my third different agency. In all that time I've never had a new office, never had furniture that wasn't some form of hand-me-down. I'm not complaining, but I will say that this is a different feeling.

There we were, a handful of people waiting to move to a new work home, trying to get a feel for what the place will be like.